Download PDF | Waleed Ziad - Hidden Caliphate_ Sufi Saints beyond the Oxus and Indus-Harvard University Press (2021).
367 Pages
Introduction
Beyond the Great Game e I n 1821, the English explorer William Moorcroft reached Ladakh, a Buddhist mountain kingdom bordering Tibet to the north. Moorcroft, who began his career as a veterinary surgeon, was recruited by the East India Company to locate superior horse breeds for the Company’s use and needed access to the fabled horse markets of Bukhara. He was accompanied by Mir ‘Izzatullah, his talented secretary, whose family had migrated from Bukhara to northern India two generations earlier. We might have thought that Moorcroft’s journey depended on the goodwill of political powerbrokers who controlled (in theory) the borders and roads.
But in fact his journey was made possible by a bāt.inī, or “hidden,” caliphate, a network of Sufi scholar-saints with whom Mir ‘Izzatullah was affiliated. Mir ‘Izzatullah suggested that they approach a certain Shah Niyaz— a Sufi born in a princely family of Tashkent, who had migrated first to Kashmir, then Yarkand in China. Shah Niyaz had been dispossessed of his Kashmiri properties after the Sikh occupation of 1819 and sought refuge in the relatively peaceful region of Ladakh, where he became a confidant of the Buddhist chief minister. Mir ‘Izzatullah’s suggestion proved fruitful: Shah Niyaz graciously offered to refer Moorcroft to Mian Fazl-i Haqq of Peshawar, the son and spiritual successor of one of Peshawar’s greatest saints, who could facilitate his journey. From Ladakh, Moorcroft traveled on horseback about 1,300 kilometers westward to Peshawar, via Kashmir and northern Punjab, where he met Fazl-i Haqq, an approachable, mild-mannered holy man who proved eager to help. Fortuitously, Fazl-i Haqq himself needed to travel to Bukhara to meet with the king, Amir Hayder, who was not just a devoted disciple of his father Fazl Ahmad Peshawari but had been appointed as one of his spiritual deputies. Moorcroft seized the opportunity. He offered to finance Fazl-i Haqq’s journey to Bukhara, in return for good references to the various rulers en route, who all venerated the Peshawari saint. Fazl-i Haqq agreed. Some weeks later, however, due to a combination of mischief and miscommunication, Moorcroft found himself in a bind, detained by Mir Murad Beg of Qunduz, the famously obstinate ruler of an autonomous state south of the Amu Darya, known to Europeans as the Oxus River. Eventually, again through Fazl-i Haqq’s network, Moorcroft was referred to Khwaja Qasim Jan, the venerated Sufi patriarch of Qunduz, who had considerable clout with the mir, who happened to be his son-in-law.
After prolonged deliberations, the Qunduzi Sufi managed to negotiate Moorcroft’s release in return for a payment to the mir. The Englishman finally succeeded in reaching Bukhara, becoming one of the few Europeans to have ventured into this legendary metropolis. But this book is not about Moorcroft. In fact, he is no more than an incidental character in a much larger story that has been overlooked because, both during and after the nineteenth century, European writings on the region across which Moorcroft traveled have only been concerned with religious figures insofar as they seemed relevant to colonial interests. Hidden Caliphate views this world from an entirely different perspective, that of the religious network that made Moorcroft’s journey possible in a time of political fragmentation. It reveals an interconnected Persianate cosmopolis that persisted into the early twentieth century. This sphere of exchange stretched across the Indus and Amu Darya well into the Inner Asian Steppes and western China: regions mediated through a shared Persian cultural-linguistic tradition and historical memory even as British, Russian, and Chinese imperial expansion encroached. Each of the real protagonists of my story—Mir ‘Izzatullah, Shah Niyaz, Khwaja Qasim Jan, Fazl-i Haqq, Bukhara’s king Amir Hayder, and thousands more—belonged to a vast, intricate network of scholar-mystics known as the Naqshbandi-Mujaddidi (or simply Mujaddidi, literally meaning “revivalist”) order. Each had undergone a rigorous course of education and spiritual training spanning well over a decade at premier institutions of higher learning in cities like Bukhara, Kabul, Peshawar, and Delhi.
The Mujaddidis followed a comprehensive “exoteric” curriculum ranging from Persian poetry, ethics, and logic to medicine and jurisprudence, before graduating to the higher “esoteric” or “hidden” sciences. Through carefully crafted courses on meditation, they learned to activate metaphysical energy centers mapped onto the physical body. These practices enabled an inward spiritual journey toward God and a return to the created world. With the knowledge and wisdom they gained, they became fit to lead others in spiritual development as well as worldly affairs. Mujaddidi scholar-saints composed one of the principal corporate groups in regions as disparate as Kashgar and Kazan. In fact, their bāt.inī khilāfat was arguably the most extensive Muslim scholastic-religious network of the seventeenth to early twentieth centuries. The Mujaddidis fused Persian, Arabic, and vernacular literary traditions; mystical virtuosity; popular religious practices; and the urban scholastic domain into a unified, yet flexible, articulation of Islam that provided coherence to diverse Muslim communities across wide-ranging territory. They also articulated some of the most effective social responses to the decline of Muslim political power and the ascendance of European colonialism; by the late nineteenth century, they had even inspired the region’s principal Muslim reformist movements.
This book asks how the Mujaddidis were able to establish this remarkable parallel form of popular leadership, which transcended and outlived contemporary political structures, surviving to the present day. It follows the emergence and evolution of their trans-Asiatic networks, which bridged intellectual, economic, and religious domains across the fragile states of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, on both sides of the Indus River and Amu Darya. At the same time, it shows how the contemporary Persianate world order—its cosmopolitan urbanites, pastoralists, and agriculturalists; its petty princes, tribal chiefs, and landed gentry alike—relied on this overarching network for stability, communication, and mediation both between competing parties and between the visible and invisible realms. Through this examination, I offer a new way of conceiving sovereignty in the Muslim world prior to the twentieth century. I argue that people across central and southern Asia understood authority structures to inhere in a two-tiered paradigm, the z. āhirī (manifest) and bāt.inī (hidden) caliphate. In this hierarchical model, which draws from terms deployed by the Sufis themselves, the hidden caliphate of Sufi networks maintained a transregional balance, positioned above the outer caliphate, the political authority made up of an amalgam of small fractured states. This model is markedly different from prevailing traditional visions of Islamic sovereignty, and certainly from more modern conceptions of so-called Islamic nation-statehood. And it challenges our understanding of the relationship between state, subject populations, and sacerdotal sphere.
This book, then, explores sovereignty not from the perspective of rulers, governors, armies, and bureaucracies but from the vantage point of Sufi communities. And in doing so, it is grounded not in contemporary political theories or courtly literature but in the lived realities of Sufis who navigated this sphere, revealing their pivotal place in sustaining a transregional order in a time of decentralization and political transformation. The Naqshbandi-Mujaddidi order had originated several generations earlier with Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindi (d. 1624), a widely revered Hindustani mystic. Sirhindi articulated the metaphysical concept of millennial revival (tajdīd-i alfī) of Islam: that, a thousand years after the Prophet Muhammad’s passing (1602), a restoration of the prophetic period’s essence would be executed by a saint of the highest credentials. Sirhindi was himself popularly designated the Mujaddid-i Alf Sani, or reviver of the second millennium. In modern historiography, he remains one of the most respected yet controversial Muslim thinkers. Today, a surprising range of Sunni socioreligious movements from Anatolia to Southeast Asia—including Salafi fundamentalists, modernists, and Sufi traditionalists—incorporate him and the Mujaddidi order into their intellectual lineage. Meanwhile, in South Asia, nationalist narratives view Sirhindi as the progenitor of the “two-nation theory,” which ultimately spurred the creation of the separate states of India and Pakistan in 1947. In modern Turkey, his theology is considered an inspiration for the ruling Justice and Development Party. Needless to say, his place in history remains contested, with heated debates centering mainly on his political legacy. Remarkably, however, very few of Sirhindi’s writings have any direct relevance to the domain of politics and statecraft; only seven of the 536 epistles that comprise his magnum opus, the Maktubat, or Collected Letters, reference contemporary politics.
The bulk of his work outlines a complex philosophical and cosmological system, synthesizing exoteric and esoteric Islamic sciences into a cohesive system. This required rearticulating the contours of shari‘a to encompass external law, doctrine, and the mystical path. In effect, Sirhindi created a discursive space where the ecstatic mystic could communicate with the sober jurist, ultimately institutionalized in his hometown, Sirhind, between Lahore and Delhi. His college drew scholars and Sufis from across the Persianate world and repackaged an array of diverse pedagogies for onward travel.1 This study centers on Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindi’s legacy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a time of drastic political transformations in the Persianate world. The great regional empires—the Mughals at Delhi and the Safavids at Isfahan, as well as the Uzbek Ashtarkhanid kingdoms at Bukhara and Balkh—were gradually disintegrating. The early eighteenth century not only witnessed deurbanization in certain regions, tribal “breakouts,” and revolts but also corresponding reorientations of overland Asiatic trade passages. The Iranian soldier of fortune Nadir Shah Afshar (r. 1736–1747) turned this volatile milieu to his advantage and rapidly assembled territory extending from the Caucasus to Delhi. But Nadir Shah’s imperial project proved ephemeral. After his death, his domains fragmented into petty feuding principalities; weak successor states at Shiraz, Khiva, Khoqand, and Bukhara eventually emerged through tribal consolidation and warfare. China’s Qing dynasty absorbed Altishahr (now southwestern Xinjiang province). Simultaneously, Nadir Shah’s erstwhile Afghan commander in chief, Ahmad Shah Durrani, consolidated power at Qandahar by skillfully engineering an alliance of Afghan tribes. Ahmad Shah briefly succeeded in carving out a so-called Durrani Empire from Nadir Shah’s eastern provinces.
But by 1800 this short-lived Afghan empire, too, collapsed into an array of successor states ranging from Herat in northwestern Afghanistan to Sindh in southern Pakistan.2 Virtually all these emergent ruling elites lacked popular legitimacy, maintaining limited sovereignty only through delicate negotiations with tribal elites and provincial potentates. By the first half of the nineteenth century, many of these nascent polities were reduced to buffer states in what came to be known in Western imperial parlance as the “Great Game” for dominance of Asia.3 Contemporary European accounts describe this period as one of cultural and intellectual decay, setting the stage for British and Russian colonial “corrective” intervention. They recount the isolation and ruination of cities like Kabul, Qandahar, Kalat, and Bukhara. When viewed solely through the lens of formal ruling structures, this indeed seems to have been the case. However, contemporary Persian, Arabic, Chagatai, Tatar, Urdu, Pashto, and Sindhi sources tell a remarkably different story, intimately bound with the intricate network of shrines, khānaqāhs (centers for Sufi practice), and madrasas associated with various Sufi orders from Hindustan and Khurasan, which were expanding their reach in this turbulent period as far as Transoxiana, Kazan, Kashgar, and Istanbul. Foremost among these Sufis were the heirs of Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindi, now known as the NaqshbandiMujaddidis. From their base at Sirhind in the Mughal heartlands, they penetrated rural and pastoral-nomadic communities and emerging regional capitals like Khoqand in the Ferghana Valley and Hyderabad on the Indus in lower Sindh. By the first half of the nineteenth century, this Sufi suborder formed the dominant Sunni institutional network in the Persianate world. Although this study spans the seventeenth to twentieth centuries, I focus on the period between the death of Nadir Shah in 1747 and the ascendancy of Afghanistan’s “Iron Amir” ‘Abd al-Rahman in 1880. It is at this time, following the Second Anglo-Afghan War, that many links across the two rivers were effectively severed, and the authority of the Sufis was most directly challenged.
Excavating this story problematizes several persistent myths about the political landscape of this region and the Muslim world at large. Notably, in addition to exploring the dual manifest / hidden caliphate as an alternative way of understanding how a decentralized region managed itself prior to the twentieth century, it also dislocates Great Game narratives, including their geographical concepts of South and Central Asia’s supposed natural frontiers. I argue instead for the persistence of a Persianate world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, encompassing Iran, Hindustan, Transoxiana, Khurasan, and beyond, and explore the interplay of cosmopolitanism and vernacularization within this ecumene. In parallel, I respond to enduring debates on the nature of lived Islam before colonialism. What did the sacerdotal domain look like before colonial interventions and modern transformations, before British and Russian bureaucrats and orientalists imposed their own definitions on Sufis and the ulama (scholars)?
Manifest and Hidden Caliphates
From Afghanistan’s historian-laureate ‘Abd al-Hayy Habibi to the acclaimed historian of the Arab world Albert Hourani, scholars have acknowledged that Sirhindi and his successors inspired new directions in Muslim culture and community. However, the structure and function of the Mujaddidi networks and the basis of their transregional authority remain a source of considerable controversy.4 The cultural-political order obtained in the Persianate sphere of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was distinct from the three most familiar paradigms of Islamic sovereignty. The first of these is the originary caliphal model, effectively merging religious and political authority. This model was largely conceived by jurists, and it disregarded political realities after the end of the Rightly Guided caliphate (632–661), the tragedy at Karbala in 680, and certainly after the fall of Fatimids of Egypt and the Abbasid Caliphate at Baghdad in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, respectively. But it still informs scholarly discourse on Muslim statehood. The second commonly available model is the bifurcated sultanate, premised on an understanding that states breaking off from the caliphate had no explicit religious ambitions and presided over societies comprised of associational or confessional religious organizations. In this model, religious organizations embodied sacred legitimacy and occupied a space functionally and physically separate from the state sphere. The so-called secular sultans would patronize religious functionaries, instrumentalizing them to rubber-stamp their kingship and buttress their own credentials among a believing population.5 A third paradigm of sovereignty, the quadripartite circle of equity (a favorite of classical Muslim political theorists), is also inadequate to describe the Persianate environment in the period under scrutiny.
Originating in Zoroastrian ideals of kingship, in this model, a monarch preserves a balance between mutually supportive classes, namely the religious hierarchy, the military, cultivators, and artisans. This model, however, fails to account for the limited sovereignty of state regimes, the transregional movement of human capital, and the complexities within the ulama and Sufi classes. Understanding the Mujaddidis and how authority operated in this region and period depends on recognizing the radical change that occurred in the eighteenth century. As older imperial and state structures broke down, local ruling elites from Hindustan, Khurasan, and Transoxiana effectively entrusted scholastic and social services to Sufi orders, whose popular authority appealed to urban intelligentsia and tribal and rural populations. These Sufis generated institutional networks separate from the fiscal-military institutions of state and possessed greater resilience and longevity. Their khānaqāhs, madrasas, and shrines formed a superstructure that enabled a transregional knowledge economy to provide coherence to the politically fragmented region through a constant flow of texts, practices, and human capital. In tandem, their rural institutions and land endowments spurred agricultural production. As in prior centuries, ruling elites did not confine themselves to a parallel “secular” space. Rather, they were active participants in the Sufi khānaqāhs; their participation as patrons and disciples was inextricably tied to the practices of power. As such, my work is an inquiry into the nature of a “fibre,” to use Joseph Fletcher’s term, which held together parts of Eurasia and enabled horizontal continuities in the precolonial and early colonial periods.6
How was this fibre fashioned? Relying on Sirhindi’s pioneering theological interventions—specifically, on reconciling divergent Sufi pedagogies and the shari‘a—the Mujaddidis represented themselves as a synthetic tradition, both transregional and local. Accordingly, they were able to absorb preexisting sacred communities and spaces, and inevitably became a point of convergence for urban ulama, Sufis, and intelligentsia; popular shrine-based Sufism; and the tribal and highland religious spheres. A diversified support and capital base meant that they were not restricted to any one region or dependent on localized sources of income. As Sufi saints, scholars, popular poets, and jurists, the Mujaddidis assumed the role of arch-intermediaries in a dynamic and fragile environment. They were called upon to mediate between urban and tribal elites and subjects, antagonistic polities, colonial and local authorities, and agrarian and highland communities.7 They led interregional trade caravans across the spectacular terrain of the Khyber Pass and Amu Darya, and, when required, even raised armies. Their institutions became public spaces furnishing a suite of social services well beyond exoteric and esoteric education and popular religious rituals. They were soup kitchens, caravanserais, and safe houses, as well as loci for trade, negotiation, and diplomacy. They were also sites for the production and propagation of didactic, polemical, and historical texts that helped define the contours of Persianate Islam in this period.8
The expansion of Mujaddidi khānaqāh networks went hand in hand with the mid-eighteenth-century political upheavals in the Mughal heartlands and contributed to a dramatic reorientation of trans-Asiatic religioscholastic and commercial networks. Ulama and Sufis forcibly displaced from Mughal centers including Sirhind, Sialkot, Lahore, and Delhi were encouraged by rulers and tribal elites to relocate toward Khurasan, Transoxiana, and beyond. Correspondingly, cities like Kabul, Qandahar, Bukhara, Srinagar, Shikarpur, Thatta, and Peshawar emerged as sacred-scholastic hubs for new north-south networks through which ulama and Sufis from as far afield as Bukhara, Baluchistan, and Altishahr could access scholarship and literature from across the Mughal Empire. The short-lived Durrani Empire was a critical catalyst for these reorientations. By the early nineteenth century, Mujaddidi institutions in Durrani territories linked Hindustan’s towns with scholastic networks as far north as Siberia. A rapid movement of scholars into urban, tribal, and rural areas generated literary production in Persian, Arabic, and local languages including Pashto, Chagatai, Tatar, Sindhi, and Punjabi. But this revival of Durrani urban centers like Kabul and Peshawar as scholastic entrepôts in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has been largely erased from historical memory.
These developments have, it seems, been eclipsed by Great Game narratives that relegate these regions to the status of barren “frontiers” or isolated “buffer states” straddling British and Russian imperial spheres of influence. Why were Sufis solicited by the Durrani Afghans, Uzbeks, and their contemporaries, and what incentives did the Mujaddidis have to accept their invitations? It is helpful to view the story through the framework of “religious economy”—that is, analogizing the complex religious environment to a marketplace, with multiple firms, producers, and consumers; competition and collusion; and the generation and distribution of spiritual capital.9 After Nadir Shah’s death, his former lands witnessed an intense competition among successor polities for cultural, social, and symbolic capital. On the demand side of this religious economy, each of the nascent states— whether the Durrani Empire, Khoqand, Khiva, Kalat, Bukhara, or smaller regional polities—required a scholastic and spiritual institutional base. Such institutions could generate the fragile new states’ bureaucracies and judicial apparatus, and in turn attract further cultural capital. Moreover, since most of their ruling families lacked historical legitimacy, Sufis and their institutions provided symbolic capital to strengthen the new dynasties. The local populations, likewise, required a range of religious services. Especially in a time of political turmoil, resettlement, and migrations, there was a high demand for blessings, faith healing, practical and spiritual guidance, and charity. Moreover, both the state and its subjects were in need of political, commercial, and suprarational mediation. This was best provided by an outside party with significant transregional, historically embodied social capital across rural, highland, pastoral-nomadic, and urban environments, including long-standing patronage structures and networks. Particularly at a time of gradated and limited sovereignty across this region, intermediaries became essential in continuing systems of exchange.10 On the supply side, the Mujaddidis had some distinct advantages among the vast number of players in the unregulated post–Nadir Shah religious marketplace.
The college at Sirhind and its subsidiaries had produced generations of scholar-mystics with expertise in law, scholastic theology, and Sufism. They inherited the centuries-old symbolic authority of the Naqshbandi order. Moreover, they personified the academic rigor of an urban Mughal high-cultural institutional environment. These Sufis, trained in the Mughal cosmopolitan milieu, could then fulfill the above areas of demand. And by the mid-eighteenth century, having lost their center at Sirhind, and many of the awqāf (charitable endowments) that undergirded their network, due to regional conflicts, the Mujaddidis needed both material resources and a support base to continue to propagate their teachings and methods. A transregional, hierarchical social-religious-political structure emerged from this dynamic situation. Sufi networks essentially formed a potent supraregional cultural space, providing both sacred and practical brokerage functions for and between multiple layers of society. The Mujaddidis and their contemporaries in the eighteenth- to nineteenth-century Persianate ecumene, then, were fashioned—and fashioned themselves—to meet the challenges of trans-Asiatic political and market reorientations. This is not to say that they were entirely novel in character. They shared certain characteristics with earlier Sufi orders and other corporate and functional groups that have received some scholarly attention—for example, the munshī secretarial class, also cultural intermediaries who provided continuity amid political flux and could be transposed horizontally from one polity to another. Not unlike the Sufis, their specific blend of education and grasp of contemporary political and social realities meant that the secretarial class could easily transition between the Mughal court, successor states, and the British East India Company.
It is indeed remarkable that even rival states often patronized the same munshīs or Mujaddidi networks at a time of constantly shifting frontiers and looming threats from greater powers. Although in their own literature the Mujaddidis saw themselves following in the footsteps of past mystics, in certain key ways they were very different from Sufis of earlier centuries. Their networks were far more widespread and institutionalized, guaranteeing exoteric and esoteric education of the highest available caliber. Thanks to Sirhindi’s intellectual legacy, they could fast absorb and synthesize earlier communities and their writings, practices, and philosophies. Much of this was of course facilitated by the realities of their age; the fractured environment needed binding agents and required the Mujaddidis to perform a broader array of functions than most Sufis who came before them. The expanded functionality of the Sufi networks can be viewed as an outgrowth of the idea of sacred kingship in the Timurid, Safavid, Ottoman, and Mughal eras. Charismatic empire builders like Shah Isma‘il Safavi and the Mughal emperor Akbar came to embody a form of sovereignty that fused worldly power and sacrality. Notions of sovereignty were grounded in millenarian epistemology and in the corresponding figure of the Sufi shaykh or pīr—meaning elder, guide, or master—as a heroic savior, heralding a new epoch in the history of mankind.11 By the eighteenth century, two structural transformations had taken place. First, the great empires had broken down, replaced with polities governed by new rulers lacking in sacred legitimacy.
Therefore, the Mujaddidis and their contemporaries became even more critical in embodying and sustaining the sacred domains. As successors of Sirhindi, the Mujaddidis, in particular, fashioned themselves as the agents of a perpetual millennial renewal. Second, Sirhindian ontology had established a Sufi domain that encapsulated both z. āhirī and bāt.inī (exoteric and esoteric) scholastic functions, thereby expanding the domain and strength of the Sufi institutions to include juristic and spiritual functions. The structure of hierarchical sovereignty was upheld by a notion circulating within the Mujaddidi and other Sufis orders of the z. āhirī (or apparent, outer, or manifest) and bāt.inī (or inner or hidden) caliphate. This dual model of sovereignty had been articulated centuries earlier by foundational Sufi thinkers like the Andalusian mystic Ibn al-‘Arabi in the twelfth century. Delhi’s eighteenth-century Mujaddidi polymath Shah Waliullah (d. 1762) lays out their respective functions: And the caliphate is manifest and hidden. Thus, [the domain of] the Manifest Caliphate is establishment of jihad, and justice, and h. udūd,12 and levying the tithe and the land tax on whoever is the rightful [recipient]. And indeed the ones who are just, carry the burdens of this within the countries of Islam. And [the domain of the] Hidden Caliphate is teaching the Holy Book, wisdom, and spiritual purification [cleansing of the ego-self] with the light of the hidden, with harsh preaching, and the attractions of the [saintly] association. As the Almighty said: “Verily, Allah conferred favor on the believers, when He sent a messenger from among them, reciting on them his verses and purifying them and teaching them the book and wisdom, although before they were in clear error.” [al-‘Imran, 164] . . . and the Prophet (peace by upon Him) said: “The ulama are the inheritors of prophets.” And the caliph is naught expect he who . . . preserves the Holy Book and the sunna, and provides training in laws of conduct [salūk, or wayfaring] and nurtures the people of good conduct [sālikīn, or spiritual wayfarers].13 On the surface this model resembles the bifurcated sultanate / religious domain paradigm. But in substance it is very different. First, there is a strict hierarchy between the two caliphates. The hidden caliphs are responsible for higher metaphysical functions of governance, while the manifest caliphs are purely responsible for the material, worldly aspects of governance. Second, in the Sufi sense, the word caliphate in general signified much more than temporal rule or a functional clerical category; it was imbued with mystical notions of personal spiritual realization, Ibn al-‘Arabi’s “perfect” human being who “governs the affairs of the world and controls them by means of the divine Names.”14 Through their piety, service, and self-realization, the hidden caliphs (khulafā’, plural of khalīfa, meaning “successors”) were divinely appointed to manage affairs on a metaphysical level, to perform cosmic functions well beyond the reach of the everyday believer, and to guide humankind in the exoteric sciences as well as the esoteric sciences of spiritual perfection. As God’s vicegerents, they were the keepers of hidden knowledge. Some, like the ones introduced in this study, were indeed public figures, but others remained anonymous. Although the hidden / manifest caliphate model became pronounced in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it also applied in degrees to earlier periods. Thus, this model not only offers a paradigm that makes sense of our period on its own terms but also a lens by which to critically evaluate other models scrutinized in recent scholarship of early modern Muslim states: sacred kingship, or the state as “military-administrative household,” or notions of bargaining, balance, cooperation, and competition between multiple loci of political power.15 And it allows us to appreciate the transition between these older models of sovereignty and later discourses on Pan-Islamism or divine sovereignty that have animated intraMuslim debates in the last two centuries. It illuminates, too, how modern constructs of the so-called Islamic state have both leveraged and entirely refashioned preexisting notions of religion, state, and subjecthood.16
The Mujaddidis and their contemporaries rarely concerned themselves with matters of practical governance and worldly, secular sovereignty in their own discourse. Even when engaging with the court, they maintained a symbolic distance in both their public performance and epistolary correspondence. For this reason, we find a myriad of Mujaddidi tracts on spiritual wayfaring and meditation, rather than “mirrors for princes,” manuals on statecraft, or opinions on military and chancery matters. In their biographies, political events (even great upheavals) are relegated to footnotes, while the primary functions of Sufis as teachers and spiritual guides are detailed and extolled. Contemporary rulers, too, acknowledged this hierarchy not only through symbolic performances exhibiting subservience to the Sufis, or through generous grants to their institutions, but as committed Sufi disciples and practitioners. On the practical level, there were notable exceptions to the general principle of avoiding the state and military sphere. The system of hierarchical sovereignty was sustained through intermittent bargaining acts between states, local power brokers, and the Sufi networks, with each party exerting pressure on the other. Political pressures often induced realignments of Sufi networks, as we will see throughout. When rulers became intolerable and threatened the Sufi orders or their constituencies, as in the Anglo-Afghan Wars, Sufi networks could even mobilize their resources to undermine the ruling classes. And, in some liminal regions lacking political leadership, they even assumed direct political control—but this was, in their own literature, seen as a burden, an ancillary function to their primary vocation of spiritual guidance.
Pieces of a Chessboard
The first casualties of this story are the Great Game narratives, starting with romanticized first-hand accounts of European adventure, heroism, and espionage in inhospitable, hostile territory. In these narratives, the lands from the Indus westward exist primarily as imperial buffer zones. Despite their exaggerated depictions and blatantly racialized tone, these tales continue to shape our conceptions of Transoxiana, Khurasan, and to a lesser extent Hindustan in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is surprising that, while other “great power”–centric narratives in regional historiography have been substantially scrutinized and impugned, secondary literature still mostly perceives this region as a collection of isolated princedoms with limited agency at the mercy of the three great powers: Lord Nathaniel Curzon’s “pieces of a chessboard upon which is being played out a game for the dominion of the world.”17 The continuing political sensitivity of this region only perpetuates such paradigms. The first Great Game histories were composed in the nineteenth century by political and military officials serving in various arenas where the British-Russian rivalry was playing out.
These works were driven by policy objectives; it was in their best interest to rebrand “local questions” as imperial concerns, with their narratives of the complex internal dynamics A corresponding, and equally imperially inflected, historiographical pronouncement was that the eighteenth century was Hindustan, Khurasan, and Transoxiana’s “dark century,” ultimately rescued by an enlightened European colonial renaissance. A tradition of histories and ethnographies, going back to John Malcolm’s History of Persia (1815), James Mill’s History of British India (1826), and Mountstuart Elphinstone’s Account of the Kingdom of Caubul (1815), held that the demise of the great Safavid, Mughal, and Uzbek empires went hand in hand with economic, intellectual, and cultural decline.23 This argument assumed many forms in the twentieth century, generally maintaining that political fractures and reorientations in the eighteenth century were the product of deficient administrative policies in imperial centers.
A Persianate Ecumene If we are to finally move away from this racialized, colonial take on this sweep of land, the false mythology of boundaries and regional decline, how can we define it instead? For the purposes of this book, I suggest that one alternative descriptor, “Persianate,” is a more legitimate category of inquiry for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In his 1970s magnum opus, Venture of Islam, Marshall Hodgson offered a concept of a Persianate ecumene stretching from Bengal to the Ottoman Empire. A shared Persian koine, with all its underlying cultural-linguistic tradition and historical memory, held this zone together. Yet for Hodgson and later scholars, this Persianate arena of exchange disappeared after the Middle Ages.25 The persistence, cohesion, and limits of a Persianate domain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is still contested. But an emerging body of scholarship evidences robust economic linkages between Transoxiana and Hindustan in this period. We now know that these linkages were accompanied by large-scale economic growth and urbanization, and began to fade only with the rise of Russian and British colonialism after the mid-nineteenth century.26 However, religious and intellectual exchange in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries remains largely unexplored. And notions of intellectual isolation have not been systematically critiqued. Relevant sources from the period have scarcely been scrutinized. There is, in particular, a dearth of microhistorical studies tracing the contours of Sufi and ulama networks that could provide the basis for exploring broader trends.27 In this respect, interrogating Mujaddidi sources from both sides of the Oxus and the Indus is highly revealing. Despite political dissolution after the collapse of Nadir Shah’s imperial project, the region evidently remained culturally, intellectually, and economically integrated. Intellectual traffic flowed both east to west and north to south; a wide array of economic classes were engaged in each locale. Without such a transregional inquiry it is difficult to perceive the existence of scholastic and religious superstructures—like the Mujaddidis—that ensured the persistence of a Persianate zone at least until the late nineteenth century.28 Significantly, Mujaddidi sources also demonstrate that a range of social currents in the urban and tribal spheres, generally treated as distinct moments in local histories, actually formed part of an interconnected web of social-intellectual-religious movements. This web encompassed movements ranging from anticolonial resistance campaigns in the Peshawar Valley, to Bukhara’s nineteenth-century renaissance, to the development of the Muftiate at Orenberg in Russia, an institution devised by the Romanovs to oversee Muslim religious affairs. Such movements cannot be understood in isolation. The Durrani Empire became the fulcrum of these trans-Asiatic networks.
This study is therefore as much a history of Persianate Sufism as it is a history of the Afghan Empire, reclaiming the pivotal place of its chief cities in sustaining inter-Asian scholastic and economic exchange. Although the empire covered most of modern-day Afghanistan and Pakistan, the nascent fields of Afghanistan and Pakistan studies ironically treat it as an ephemeral transitory phase between the Mughal and Safavid collapse and British colonialism. There is a dearth of literature on the religio-scholastic dynamics of the empire and, frankly, of Afghanistan and Pakistan themselves until well into the twentieth century. Even studies on the Afghan Mujaddidis, arguably the most widespread Sufi tradition in Afghanistan, are concerned with their political involvements at the expense of their broader scholastic and social functions and pedagogies.29 Hidden Caliphate, instead, demonstrates that Sufi networks like the Mujaddidis, transacting within the Persian literary medium, perpetuated a supraregional Persianate cultural and political order centered on the Afghan dominions. Fusing terms from Hodgson and Sheldon Pollock, I refer to the zone in which the Mujaddidis transacted as a Persianiate cosmopolis. The term polis signifies the political dimension of this ecumene, while Persian suggests the role of language in, to borrow Pollock’s description of Sanskrit, “producing the forms of political and cultural expression that underwrote this cosmopolitan order.”30 By establishing shrines, khānaqāhs, and madrasas, the Mujaddidis sustained a Hindustan-Khurasan-Transoxiana zone of sacred authority through networks of pilgrimage, trade, and literary production. Their circulating texts, miscellanies, and genealogies in Persian and its vernaculars generated a shared knowledge economy and sacred memory. This study uses Mujaddidi biographies, hagiographies, and genealogies to map the fluid contours of this world and the conceptual spaces of sacro-cultural exchange. Often revolving around the motif of travel and pilgrimage, these texts provide a unique window into how local actors conceptualized macrospaces, centers, and frontiers. Moreover, the patterns of reproducing and distributing these texts provides a map of the circulatory spaces of underlying knowledge systems. The results demand a reevaluation of the interplay between the cosmopolitan and local or vernacular in the Persianate cosmopolis.
The Mujaddidis no doubt embodied transregional cosmopolitanism.31 However, a localization of Mujaddidi identity was required to become properly embedded in each node of their transregional network. This study therefore considers the processes of cosmopolitan transculturation, asking how communities adopted sacred identities and pedagogies that affiliated them with distant, often personally unfamiliar, cosmopolitan structures.32 A hybrid local and cosmopolitan identity was in fact necessary to the expansion of the network. Each node within the Mujaddidi network was oriented locally, regionally, and transregionally. For example, literature on cosmology and wayfaring was intended for audiences from Bukhara to Punjab; devotional poetry was composed in Arabic, Persian, and assorted vernaculars; and biographies and genealogies fused local Afghan and Uzbek tribal saints with great regional luminaries like Sirhindi. Mujaddidi shrine architecture employed vernacular media and was integrated into local sacred landscapes, forming a part of transregional and local pilgrimage circuits across the cosmopolis. At a broader level, therefore, this study suggests that the emergence of Sufi vernacular identities within the Persianate cultural-linguistic-sacred umbrella in fact sustained the broader Persianate sphere in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The forging of real and imagined communities of scholars and mystics with shared hagiographical narratives helped the region survive internecine conflicts between fledgling states. It even insulated them, at least temporarily, from some of the ruptures of colonialism.
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